Comparison of Collisionless Shock Structures with the MHD Model

Details Comparison of Collisionless Shock Structures with the MHD Model Comparison of Collisionless Shock Structures with the MHD Model

Dec 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011agufmsh13b1978c&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2011, abstract #SH13B-1978

Physics

Plasma Physics

[7851] Space Plasma Physics / Shock Waves

Scientific paper

Shocks are ubiquitous in astrophysical plasmas from the planetary bow shocks, produced by the interaction of solar wind with planetary magnetic fields, to the shocks associated with supernova explosions and jets. Global morphologies of these shocks are described by magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) with the assumption of local thermal equilibrium, which may easily be reached only when collisions are frequent, and the resulting Rankine-Hugoniot shock jump conditions are applied to obtain the relationship between the upstream and downstream physical quantities. On the other hand, it is generally believed that collisions are infrequent in astrophysical plasmas, with the shock widths much smaller than the collisional mean free paths, and in fact, a variety of kinetic phenomena are seen at the shock fronts through in situ observations. Hence, it is natural that both methods have been adopted in the theoretical and numerical studies of the astrophysical shocks to describe different aspects of the physical phenomena associated with the shocks. Nevertheless, the transition from the kinetic scale to the MHD scale has not been understood well and the two regimes of shock descriptions have been treated separately. In this paper, we would like to address this issue with the results of particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations applied to non-relativistic and relativistic shocks. We will compare the results of PIC simulations with the structures predicted by MHD. We will discuss how the upstream flows become thermalized through the shock transition layers using the phase space and velocity distribution plots taken from different regions of the shock structures for quasi- parallel and perpendicular shocks. We will also discuss how entropy changes across the shock fronts.

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